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John Bechtold, "U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)
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I was groomed to become one of
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John Bechtold
his wives this week on Disorder, the
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John Armenta
podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein
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John Armenta
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is John Armenta, and I'll be your host for this episode today. I'm with John Bechtold of Duke University, and we'll be talking about his book, US Militarism and the terrain of Negotiating Dead space. John, welcome to New Books Network.
- [03:07]
John Bechtold
Thank you. Happy to be here.
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John Armenta
All right, so before we get into the book, let's just talk a little bit about yourself and your background. Who are you, and what is your academic journey that led you to writing this book?
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John Bechtold
Wow. Yeah. So I am a veteran. I think. You knew that. Yeah. Retired. Left the military in about 10 years ago, now a little bit more. And I went to Duke University initially to pursue a master's degree. And while there, I became interested in thinking about how wounded veterans were kind of reclaiming their lives after their injuries in war. And that really kind of steered me onto this path, really. I became really kind of focused on the dissonance between what their lives were like and how their really journey and their wartime service was understood by the general public, or what I thought it was how I thought it was understood by the general public. And that's really kind of what's taken me to here. And then I went on to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I completed a PhD in American Studies, and here I am now. I published the first book about a year ago now. I think it's just out in paperback, actually.
- [04:29]
John Armenta
Thank you. And you're also a photographer, an artist of some.
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John Bechtold
Yeah, I was. I was introduced to photography at Duke University and Center for Documentary Studies and haven't shown work for some time. I have a photography project in mind that I hope to get after. In the summer. This summer, if not into the fall, but yeah. So the last time I showed work was from a project in Beirut, Lebanon, and that was in the Pensacola Museum of Art about five years ago now.
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John Armenta
Well, yeah, we'll definitely talk about new work towards the end of this interview, but how did that artistic and that photographic eye play into this work?
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John Bechtold
Well, you know, it's an interesting question. I'm not sure. Well, there's two ways, actually. That's a really perceptive question, John. I would say let Me start with just as a photographer, I really became interested in the medium itself, and not only as a practitioner, but as a theorist and thinking through really, how stable photographs are as cultural texts or memory documents or how representative they are of war or really any other. Any other event that they or tend to represent. So there's that theoretical piece, but as a direct intervention into my work, I had thought that I would like to maybe return to Iraq and make some photographs and kind of supplement the written critical work with a visual essay of Iraq, hoping that maybe I could potentially, you know, maybe render it visible in a way that is not possible in American culture. And I decided not to do that. And the reason why is because of photography and my own kind of acculturation and my own Americanness would be a kind of an obstacle to what I could potentially represent. So I decided to outsource the photography to Iraqi emerging Iraqi photographers and asked them to make pictures of Iraq for an American audience. And so that's kind of like the addendum to this work. And the portfolio of that project, I think, was exhibited about, oh, three or four years ago now, and it's archived at Duke University. Great.
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John Armenta
Thank you. Now, let's get into to the book itself. So before. Before we're talking about the big ideas of the book, let's just get into that. That big word in the title, militarism. How do you define militarism and what is its role in your argument and in this text?
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John Bechtold
Well, you know, I think that the American public in general is conditioned to think about war in a particular way. And I became interested in exactly how the war is represented in a cultural context. And I felt like it is limiting. Right. That we kind of have a tendency to kind of venerate the soldier body in ways that I think are unhelpful for a more inclusive human accounting of what happens in combat and in war. And so that's. So my interest in militarism is to try to kind of sort through that haze and to try to explain exactly why we think a certain way. And I don't mean to ascribe general thought processes to a large group of people, but in general, I think there's this pervasive understanding in American culture that the military is to be venerated to the point where there's almost no kind of critical inquiry into exactly how this entire kind of apparatus functions.
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John Armenta
Thank you. And so key to your argument is actually the military's own doctrine. So how does the US Military understand information and knowledge and Then after. After you explain that, how does the military understand the media and journalists?
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John Bechtold
Yeah, well, so I actually say in the book that the military weaponizes the media. And I don't mean to, you know, for that to be a hyperbolic comment. I mean it very precisely that the military considers the media as an asset equivalent to other assets of war. And that's a part of like the mediatization of war and what media scholars call mediatized war. So I'm very much. My work is very much aligned in that regard. What was the first part of your question?
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John Armenta
So how does the military's own doctrine explain information and knowledge?
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John Bechtold
Okay, so, yeah, so let me point right to the joint doctrine that describes that process. And I actually write in the book about an epigraph to the second chapter of Information Operations, where whomever wrote that, I don't know that the author's not disclosed in the manual. Basically, borrowed dialogue from a 1992 film, Sneakers, as the epigraph where the two, the protagonist and the antagonists in the film are talking. One of them is played by Sir Ben Kingsley. His name is Cosmos. The other guy, Cosmo. The other guy is Robert Redford. And they're basically Robert Redford. And his crew is entangled in the NSA in some way. I can't recall the exact plot, but anyway, the Cosmos says to Redford that there's a war out there, friend, a world war. And it's not about who controls the bullets, it's about who controls the information. And so I think that the correct answer to your question, John, is that the military recognizes the information environment as a mediated space where they are represented. And they seek ways to kind of structure what I call the visual and discursive field to benefit not themselves necessarily, but their military and tactical objective.
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John Armenta
Yeah, and that really plays out throughout. Throughout the book. Is the information space is part of what the military, the US Military is battling over? But there's this other term that is both in the title and comes up a lot, and that's dead space. So first, what is dead space according to military doctrine? And then how does it apply to the information and the media environment?
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John Bechtold
Again, I mean, and that's really the thrust of the book, I think. And so I visualize dead space as a location in the information environment where war is legible on the body. And what I argue is that dead space must be made to fail in the information environment. Otherwise spectators to war will be confronted with the destruction that occurs in war. So, and I kind of came across that mobilized and I Mobilizing dead spaces, ahoyeristic in that way, because I really began thinking about the kind of the term itself and how it's used in military doctrine as a location in the terrain that is, as a threat to whom ever is operating in that area, because the adversary is pretend specific potentially, or possibly not visible. And so I began thinking, well, dead space is an odd term to use because dead space is very much alive. It's a threat because there is somebody there and that person or that adversary is not visible. And so then I began thinking about the term dead as a. To be devoid of perception. And I've kind of mobilizing that term and applying it to the information environment and saying there is dead space in this information environment. Well, and that dead space is a threat to the military and it must be made to fail. Its visibility must be made to fail.
- [13:26]
John Armenta
Okay, so the dead space is the area where it could be a threat, but the soldiers on the ground are unable to properly perceive it. And then in the information space, it is the stories that could be told, and we're just unaware of what they could be, and they could still be a threat. Is that correct?
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John Bechtold
Yes. And so I mean, to talk specifically about, I think, how the term is conceived in manifest in military doctrine, I draw on the theory, some theorization by Paul Virilio, who wrote famously the seminal Warren Cinema. And he defines something called the geometrification of looking, which is the line between the shooter's eye through the sight of the weapon onto the body. And so. And I said, well, in dead space, the reason why it is called dead space in the military, because that sight line is fractured, the shooter cannot see the potential adversary. So the geometrification of looking is kind of disjointed now. And so, and I appropriate that into the information environment and say, well, what the military is trying to do inversely is disjoint the ocular line, if you want to think of it in that way, from the spectator who sees war to how it is actually unfolding in the multitude of ways, I should say,
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John Armenta
okay, great, so we'll come back to this. And I think as we talk through the very specific case that this book is about, we'll have chances to come back to it. So the core of the book is really centered around the battles of Fallujah and specifically the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. So before we get into your argument that you go through in the book, very briefly, what happened in Fallujah in
- [15:40]
John Bechtold
2004, well, two things. Well, a lot happened in Fallujah in 2004, but the battle I'm referring to, or the assault, which I call in the book the Assault in Fallujah, is the second military assault. And it's canonized in American cultural memory as the Second Battle of Fallujah. And indeed, it may be the only battle in the Iraq war that is canonized in that way. I don't know, but I think it is. If there is a battle, it is the Battle of Fallujah. And so that's why it kind of came to my attention. I was there at the time. I was not in the battle of Second Battle or part of those assaults directly, but I was in Iraq at that time as well. So the second assault occurred, I think, in November, just after the presidential election in 2004. The first assault occurred, I think, in April or at the very last, very end of March, the beginning of April of 2004 of that year. And actually the Marines withdrew, and they were ordered to withdraw. Now, the military historians, and a point to a political decision was made to ask the military to withdraw, and they did. And then they began planning for the second assault soon thereafter and then initiated that assault in November. And that first assault, I don't know if you recall, was brought about by the what is, I guess, called the Blackwater deaths. I think it might be memorialized now. The 24 Blackwater contractors were killed and mutilated in the city. And that is the mediated event that I think precipitated the military's intervention. As I understand it from reading military history, most military leaders did not favor an assault and were against it. This is in the Marine Corps history, in the, the army history of the Iraq war.
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John Armenta
Okay, so for the, in, in this assault in Fallujah, the, the second assault, beyond the physical objectives, you talk, talk about media and information objectives that the military had, the Marine Corps had for the battle. Can you talk through what some of these information objectives in the assault were?
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John Bechtold
Well, yeah, okay. So to bridge these two battles within the kind of the prism of its mediation, on the one hand, the first assault was a response to an immediate mediated event, and that actually recalled an event years ago in Somalia where a soldier's body was mutilated and drugged through Somalia. And that event is kind of called the Mogadishu moment. And for, and this is, and what I'm talking to you about is not my opinion. This is historized in the military histories that political leaders at the time were worried that Fallujah would present itself as another Mogadish moment. And that's why they advocated and for the first assault. But when, but when information about the destruction of Iraqi bodies kind of became visible, then Iraqi leaders and leaders from the United nations began to press for a withdrawal. And then it occurred. So the military, as it's historized, attributes the withdrawal to a so called loss in the information environment. So for the second assault in Fallujah, which occurred six months later or so in November, they invited kind of 92 embedded journalists to, to Fallujah to, to help kind of control the narrative and also took steps to silence Al Jazeera and make it difficult to report in Fallujah by cutting off power and so on and so forth. So that's where what the military is, how the military is kind of framing their intervention. But one of the reasons why I became interested in the story itself is because one of the photographs that emerged from Fallujah, made by a photographer named Lucien Reed, who was embedded with, I think the 3rd Marines, had become popularized, at least in the Marine Corps, perhaps more broadly in the United States and definitely in the United States at that time. And so I thought, well, you know, let me think about this photograph and perhaps if I can understand the context with which it emerged at the time, that that would give me some insight. And so I went looking for the instantiation of this photograph and press reporting and looked at every newspaper, actually old school in the library. Microfiche newspapers from New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, New York Post, from two weeks before the assault to two weeks after the salt. I was in there for two weeks and I couldn't find the photograph. I thought, well, this is interesting. A photograph that seems to be so popularized now wasn't available at the time and I wanted to know the origin. So I actually called the photographer and Lucian Reed was very gracious. He called me back and explained to me exactly what happened and why I didn't see it. And then truth is, he never forwarded to an editor at the time it was requested later. And then once it emerged in the public domain, then this photograph was enjoined. A lot of responses from both sides of the political spectrum in terms of the heroism demonstrated by the, the, the Marines that were pictured. I'd rather not use their names because their names have been bandied about enough. Probably I don't want to be doing that myself. But so, yeah, so that's, that's why I became interested.
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John Armenta
So I definitely want to come back to the questions that I had already prepared, but let's stay with this for a while. What did that photo represent? What was the argument of that photo and how did it become. I mean, obviously it happened during, during the, during the battle. But how did that photo become the one that stood in for the Marines in that battle?
- [23:50]
John Bechtold
Well, it didn't become it at the time and not till later. And, and to. And so that's an interesting story. Again, you know, there's a, an American studies scholar that says follow the money and, and so you follow the money and what you what, what I learned is that the photograph was later canonized as a sculpture and it's on two military bases now. And there was a not for profit organization that when they heard the story of the veteran whose wounded body is photographed and depicted in the photograph under other reasons, visual and aesthetic reasons, why I think that photograph might appeal to certain a group of people. But it was recognized as a story of heroism and that story of heroism was appropriated to fundraise for a project on a military facility.
- [24:48]
John Armenta
And what are the stories that are missing because these stories about heroism really focus on individual sacrifice, which you talk a lot about in the book. But does that leave out by focusing on this one wounded Marine and the two other Marines who are helping him out? What are we missing by focusing on that frame instead of everything else?
- [25:21]
John Bechtold
Well, I think so much. Let's start with the abject destruction of the city itself. I think there's various reports about the number of deaths, Iraq body count for instance, but also the actual, the destruction of the infrastructure. I think the train station, the military breached the train station with A mine clearing line charge to initiate the assault. And that train station didn't open until 2018. Displaced residents from the city. And I think most insidiously it was the use of depleted uranium ammunition. I don't have the name of the study here, but we could look it up real quickly because it is public, it is open source, but there is evidence of high rates of cancer in Fallujah residents after the battle disproportionate to other areas in the region at the level, at the rates that gestured to the atomic attack in Hiroshima and Japan. So researchers began looking into this. And so there's, you know, a generation of Fallujah residents born with congenital birth anomalies, high rates of cancer, disproportionate, I think disproportionate to other areas in the region. So there's that, so there's the human accounting. Right. And there's the, you know, I think I've heard it referred to as an herbicide to the actual just destruction of the urban area.
- [27:11]
John Armenta
Yes. And getting back to, going back to the argument as it unfolds in the book, um, you know, they, we see this example of this, this one photo, and even though it was, you know, what did you say, like half a year after the, the conclusion of the battle, it becomes as the stand in for the, for the Marines themselves.
- [27:36]
John Bechtold
Maybe a little sooner than that, but.
- [27:38]
John Armenta
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but part of it. But you, you already talked about how the, the Marines and the military more broadly help to set the conditions for that information environment. You know, like, you talk about the embedded journalists that were working with the, the Marine Corps. They got great access to the Marines, whereas journalists not working with the government were, were denied access and even probably bombed themselves. What other type of tactical decisions were based off of these information and media goals? You talk about one particular example, hospital. How is that tactical decision also part of the bigger information battle that was going on?
- [28:29]
John Bechtold
Well, I think that the problem that the military was very intent on mitigating was the destruction of bodies in Fallujah. And I think for that reason they seized the hospital the day before the assault initiated to prevent knowledge of wounded bodies from reaching the public domain. And I say that because most of the journalists operating in the area at the time would go to the hospital and talk to the chief surgeons just to see how many bodies are coming into the facility. And so the military was controlling whatever information flowed from the hospital before the battle started. Now, I think that's a tactical, a tactical initiative, and that's not necessarily that is coercive force. It's not necessarily persuasive force. So they try to maybe kind of truncate the flow of information at one specific site which they believed, which they believe would be a threat or a likelihood. And also more broadly, in the information environment, the military, or the Department of Defense even by extension, seeks to structure the type of information in the public as well. And so the military media entanglement really occurs when there is a tactical objective and there is a military response on the ground as well as a tactical response in the information environment, which is a domain of battle. And I'm calling it the information environment because that's the military's term for it. Or the media scholars might call it the mediascape, or the new media ecology is the term, or the media ecology visual field, or a visual cultural theorist, for instance. And so the two examples that I point to in the book that I found compelling were the Marlboro Marine, I'm not sure if you ever heard of that moniker, and a Doonesbury comic strip that appeared at about that same time as well. And the military intervened in both instances. And, and that kind of demonstrates to me how they try to capitalize on social knowledge or cultural knowledge to kind of displace some of the human accounting that we talked about just moments ago.
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John Armenta
Yeah, let's talk about that in a moment. But just to backtrack a bit, would you consider these conversations that these journalists were having with the chief surgeons about the number of people coming out of the hospital? Is that like the, the information dead space that the military was trying to avoid? And, and by controlling that flow of information, they've eliminated the, the potential threat of that so called dead space.
- [31:47]
John Bechtold
And I would say the dead space is the actual bodies in the hospital that were wounded. Yeah. And the visibility is. Is what. The visibility of those bodies must be made to fail, is the argument that I make in the book.
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John Armenta
Okay, okay.
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John Bechtold
And it's. And I would also want to point out too, really, at this juncture, and this is important to me, it's not just, you know, the bodies of Iraqi citizens or assailants, it's also the bodies of the military veterans themselves who are critically wounded and injured. I mean, I've seen some horrific photographs of wounded soldiers and wounded Marines coming out of Fallujah. And those are also photographs where the effect of war is legible on the body. And that is also something that cannot be made visible in the public domain.
- [32:37]
John Armenta
And that's probably a good place to turn to in talking about the Marlboro Marine and the Doonesbury comic. So how were those two different examples ways that the military was controlling how or the US Government more broadly was controlling how information about wounded service members was getting to the public?
- [33:03]
John Bechtold
Right. And let me say too, I'm not sure that the controlling is necessarily the best word because I think the military offers is limited, especially in an immediate environment where social media and their other media flows make it almost impossible to control what happens. And I point to an example of that in the book as well. But to your point about the Marlborough Marine, and I don't know if you recall that, but it's its own Wikipedia page and I suppose I'm not necessarily protecting anybody by disclosing the name, but I'd rather not do that. I'd rather not do that. But. So anyway, a Marine in Fallujah and it just like about eight or so days into the battle, a Marine in Fallujah was photographed by a photojournalist named Luis Cinco for the Los Angeles Times. And the, the Marine had a, was just a portrait really. And the Marine was smoking a cigarette just after a battle, I guess, bit of dirt and blood on his face. And it ran, I think in the Chicago Tribunal, the Los Angeles Times, and then it was picked up by the New York Post and the New York Post labeled it the Marlboro Marine because of the cigarette. And within, I think that same day Dan Rather, who was then, I think an anchor for ABC News, maybe kind of editorialize the photograph on the evening telecast. And so then now it's in the public domain and that's when the military intervenes. And actually I actually think the President of the United States at the time may have sent that Marine cigars or something like that. I don't write about that in the book. That's innuendo, anecdotal. But anyway, the, I think the commandant or the, the commander of the area commander actually visited this, this soldier or this Marine gave him an award and offered to send him out to remove him from the battlefield and send him home. And so it was a kind of a cultural event in that moment. And again, it's its own Wikipedia page now to talk about how these kind of the military preforms and journalists kind of preform cultural memory in this kind of, in this mediate environment today. So but anyway, the way I frame that in the book is that, you know, we have a photograph of a soldier who is alive and that kind of, it's easy to approximate ideas about what I call the sacrificial soldier body kind of project that onto the, the, the photograph because the Marine is alive. And I basically suggest that the reason why the military offered to send him home after he was made famous is because it would be particularly damaging if he were killed later because then you would not be able to hide that dead space, his dead body. It would literally be dead space and the military would not be able to, would not be able to hide that. And so that's why I felt like they wanted to get him out of there. But he ended up not. He stayed.
- [36:40]
John Armenta
Yeah. And yeah, I like, I'm very familiar with this photo. I've actually used it in teaching before talking about represent representation of, of military masculinity. Megan McKenzie has a great article about the life of the photo and its cultural meanings and students pick up on it really well. And I'm surprised that many of the students actually have seen the photo even though at this point it's probably older than the photo itself is older than they are. But it still has that type of iconic position in, in American cultural memory, even for people who were, you know, small children or not even born when, when this battle was going on.
- [37:31]
John Bechtold
Right, yeah. And I think we also should say too that the, the Marine later, you know, redeployed with his unit, left the Marine Corps and was struggling for some time and actually contemplated suicide. And without the intervention, as I understand it, through newspaper accounts and other written accounts, without the intervention of Luis Cinco himself, very well may have sadly ended his life. And so again, and you asked the question earlier. Well, you know, what is a face or what is not visible? Well, in that story I just articulated, there is not visible. You know, the Marine didn't want that photograph. The Marine didn't want that kind of adulation and didn't want his body to be mobilized as persuasive force. In the information environment you tell yourself
- [38:23]
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- [39:53]
John Armenta
now connect that to Doonesbury. How does a comic feel fit into. Into this?
- [40:01]
John Bechtold
Yeah, Doonesberry is great. Well, so, I mean, Dosberry by Gary Trudeau. It's a comic strip in syndication since I think the mid-70s, early-70s, actually. And yeah, I mean, Gary Ch's an unlikely artist to be, I think, enlisted into the military targeting process or into this information environment on behalf of the military because he's a critique and he was a very vociferous critic of the president himself. But nonetheless, there's a character in this comic strip. His name is BD and for your listeners who may not be familiar with this character, BD is kind of a roguish type of conservative ideologue. And he notoriously always wears a helmet in the comic strip. And so Gary Trudeau wants to like, actually almost at the same time as the. The first battle in Fallujah. BD is a reservist in the military, goes to Fallujah and is wounded in an ambush of some sort and loses his leg. And that's the storyline in the comic strip. And for the first time in the history of the comic strip, this character is illustrated without a helmet. And that was a momentous event for followers of the comic strip. Shocking. And it's interesting now to think about it, but it very much was, and Kudu himself will point to that actual storyline as one of the seminal moments in the history of the comic strip. And every 10 or so years when we celebrate the Dewsbury storyline, Beatty will emerge in that context again. So, anyway, so I found I was interested. Okay, so now there's a, you know, a comic strip of a veteran in Fallujah who's injured concurrent with the planning for a second operation. And this storyline continues all the way out through until even after the second military assault in Fallujah. And I feel like that the rendition of the soldier body is a representation of this kind of sacrificial ethos that we associate with service and military culture, that BD is making a sacrifice for the nation in a way. And so I became interested in that, and then so did the military. Actually on the first. As soon as that storyline appeared, they contacted Gary Trudeau and started inviting him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And he made frequent and multiple visits to Walter Reed at the request of the military, on their invitation and. And admitted, I think, in various interviews that without. Without that opportunity and that experience, he wouldn't have. Wouldn't have known where this storyline was going. He called it like a rolling experience in naturalism or something like that. And so I thought, okay, so here the military is inviting this person to come to Walter Reed. So then there's an obvious kind of cultural valuation of that storyline that is appealing to the military, otherwise they would not have reached out to them. And as it so happens, you know, I think they found it useful, and I found it interesting because it was set in Fallujah when the military is destroying bodies and buildings in the city.
- [43:50]
John Armenta
Yeah. And also interesting, like you mentioned earlier, Trudeau has been. Was a critic of Bush, who's a critic of the war. And they. And. And even the. The pro war and the anti war, they still found this place to meet in, you know, talking about the sacrificial soldier body and. And venerating the. The body of the sacrificial soldier.
- [44:15]
John Bechtold
Yeah, and we. We should parse that out a little bit. But. But one thing I want to. I want to mention to you as well is that, you know, I became curious about this BD character itself within the kind of mimesis of the. The comic strip. And it is, as it happens, that bd, you know, his first journey into war was the Vietnam War, or what I call in the book, make a point to call the American war in Vietnam. Right. Just to kind of, you know, to remind everybody that the frame of war is not Americanized. You know, people think differently. The Vietnamese did not call the Vietnam War the Vietnam War. It's the American War. The American War in Vietnam is how I refer to it in the text. And so BD Goes to Vietnam, and what I find interesting is that he befriends a guy named Fred, who's the Viet Cong, and they both at one point, kind of wander away from their Units, I guess, and become lost. And now they're like in this kind of survival situation where it's best for them to kind of help each other kind of to make their way. And in this process, Beedi becomes kind of acculturated and being stinkingly different, thinking differently about the so called enemy. And that's really the kind of the thrust of the storyline. And I found that interesting. And it's kind of a rather prescient critique. Right. On the one hand, Trudeau and and during the Vietnam era is really criticizing the frame of war that acculturates bodies into categories of agent and victim. And then in the Iraq war, he's celebrating a kind of a rendition of the sacrificial soldier body, which is a very different critique and one made possible probably because of his enlistment into the military information processes.
- [46:18]
John Armenta
Yeah, thank you for that. Let's talk more about this sacrificial soldier body because it's something that comes up again and again throughout the text. We mentioned it before with the first image that you talked about and again with the Marlboro Marine and now bd. But what is the sacrificial soldier body, broadly speaking, as a, as a concept?
- [46:49]
John Bechtold
Well, I'm really, I think I'm drawing on this cultural knowledge that constructs the soldier body. And to be a body is to be subjected to kind of social crafting and form, as Judith Butler would argue. And so I'm thinking about. And I'm not talking about actual people, right. I'm talking about a subjective configuration. And it's important, I think, to conceptualize some that we think of veterans as people who make sacrifices for the nation. And their sacrifices are service in war, sometimes sacrificing themselves or sacrificing a body part or their own lives, which is kind of graduated as the ultimate sacrifice in that schema. So I'm really gesturing to that kind of cultural knowledge. But I think there's a couple scholars that really help to illustrate this, I think. One is anthropologist Zoe Wool, who dedicates a chapter in her book After War called I think the Economies of Patriotism maybe is the title of the chapter. So I found that very helpful as we'll talk specifically about the nature of sacrifice in that configuration. Another is Royce Granton, who in Total Mobilization talks about, writes about the trauma hero, actually argues that the narratology of war from an Americanized viewpoint since World War II is to feature the traumatic experience, to tell war through the prism of the experience of American soldiers, a traumatic experience, a revelatory Experience something that's unspeakable and that is privileged knowledge. So those kind of concepts, two scholars helped kind of inform how I'm thinking about the. The soldier body in a cultural context. And I also found some inspiration and prescient ideas from scholar Claire Cisco King in Washed in Blood talks about the. The victim hero archetype, if you're familiar. Maybe, I don't know. But the. The film I Am Legend, and Will Smith's character, I think he unleashes some type of virus. But anyway, he redeems himself by finding an antidote and making sure. And sacrificing his life to make sure that he gets to a population of people to, I guess, reverse the effects of it or what have you. So in that case, his redemption requires a sacrificial act. And I think in the soldiers, as I'm thinking about it, as it applied to the soldier body, that the soldier's kind of sacrificial act is actually just serving in war. And so I think that archetype is kind of converging into this formation of what I think of as the sacrificial soldier of lady. And I think also the military recognizes that formation and recognizes the cultural utility of that formation and seeks to deploy it as a strategy of displacement in the information environment and displacing dead space.
- [50:26]
John Armenta
Can you expand on that, say more? Because I really like where you go on with this.
- [50:31]
John Bechtold
Well, so I think, like, for instance, we referenced the Marlboro Marine. So I think the Marlboro Marine is the sacrificial soldier body. It's not the actual person who was photographed, but rather the kind of symbolic utility of the photograph lends itself to that type of configuration. I think people, American audiences, kind of approximate that evaluation of the body when they see that photograph. And so that photograph is what we have is the visual artifact. We don't have the visual artifact of the Marines that were killed or severely wounded at a cache or, you know, on their way on a C17 or on their way to the United States or Walter Reed. Now, Bethesda, we don't have those photographs. Right. Instead we have a photograph alive, a photograph of a veteran alive. And so dead Space, to me, kind of announces itself through that particular configuration formation. So when we see that Marine, we. What I'm suggesting is that we should understand that there's a kind of. Has cultural work to do. It's displacing the effect of war on other bodies. Yeah.
- [51:57]
John Armenta
And as you mentioned several times in the book, it's not Just displacing the. The dead space of the injured and killed Marines, but also the Iraqis. And one point you mentioned several times is by imagining the soldier, the Marine or the veteran as either a hero or a victim, we stop to see them as an agent of violence, too. Is that right?
- [52:27]
John Bechtold
Yes. Yeah. And that's actually scrin. And that's. Yeah. And scrin suggests that's how the trauma hero operates in American culture, you know, and then that's the agent tile. Agent tile, violence. Right. And I guess, as I argue is you can't have a victim and agent in the frame. It's one or the other. And generally speaking, photographs or discursive texts that represent war generally do not represent the American veteran as an agent of violence. The veteran is portrayed as a victim of violence. And I think, Scranton man, I don't want to talk about what another scholar may or may not say, but the trauma here, as I understand trauma, is the kind of the psychical wound, if you will.
- [53:19]
John Armenta
Got it, Got it. And so this is how. And you said, like, the military is definitely aware of this. You know, the idea of the sacrificial soldier body. And this gets back to why there was a photographer, why Cinco was there in the first place to take that photo of the Marlborough Marine. And so let's. We're kind of going back in the. In the book a bit, but can you say some more about the. This relationship between the journalists who were, in your words, militarized and were part of the assault? They weren't just embedded in the units, but their notepads and their cameras were also, you know, tools as part of this assault.
- [54:10]
John Bechtold
Right, right. And I say that they're militarized not as a. As a pejorative or anything like that. Right. I say it because they actually were enmeshed in a military process that sought to produce or at least condition the emergence of cultural texts like photographs, in some cases news dispatches, that would be deployed as coercive force or persuasive force. So because they were unlisted, enlisted in that process under those terms, they are therefore militarized, regardless of what they produce. And I think that's the distinction. And that's why I said earlier that weaponization is not like a hyperbolic comment. It's, yes, they are indeed weaponized. They are a part of that process. They are viewed as a combat asset, a category that can produce persuasive force in the information environment that is favorable to the military, not the military in general, but the specific objective at that time on the ground.
- [55:22]
John Armenta
Okay, thank you for that. So I want to start wrapping up here. But as this book is speaking to several different audiences, I think people who are interested in military history would want to read this, but also people who are interested in media and communications. What can you say to the military history folks about the media side? And what can you say to the media folks about the military history side? Why do these two groups need to be talking to each other a little more? And basically, why should they be reading your book?
- [55:56]
John Bechtold
Well, I mean, I don't know that they should be talking to each other necessarily. And I'm not. And I guess I'm not. I think what I'm advocating, therefore, is a more kind of critical understanding of what is happening. And I think the, the cornerstone of that is to acknowledge that the information environment, as the military calls it, or the BD escape, is a domain of battle. It's not. If your orientation, the orientation should not be to the media should do this and the military should do this, or the military is not doing this or the media is not doing this. I think that all misses the point. The point is, is that the institutions themselves recognize the media, media ecology as battlefield terrain. So I would say to the media, maybe understand that you're part of this battlefield terrain.
- [56:59]
John Armenta
Okay, thank you. So turning now to current events, you know, like, what have you learned from doing this work, doing this research and looking at the current war going on right now in Iran? For, you know, for many of us in America, it is a media war because we only see it on tv. And of course, for the Iranians, it is not. Is very, very upfront and physical. But what is the, what is this relationship between the information environment and the, the on the ground bombs dropping environment right now that you see?
- [57:40]
John Bechtold
Yeah, well, and I would say that it's a mediated war and all war is mediated. And, and I think that's how most Americans experience war and most anybody that's not involved in war experiences or as a mediated event. So, so there's that in terms of. So I would say that we, we've been talking so far about dead space. And I would say that the, the young children, Iranian children that were killed in the school adjacent to a military installation in Iran represent dead space. And I think when you see the response by the military, the initial denials and then we'll investigate, and those are responses that are kind of expected to kind of maybe decontextualize exactly what had happened, even speculation. I think that one of the Tomahawk missiles would have was fired by Iran or something like that. So I think that initial posturing is kind of announces that there is dead space in the military or the, by extension of the government is trying to conceal it because of a delegitimatized war.
- [59:10]
John Armenta
Right, right, right. You know that. And, and, and so it needs to frame it in a way that, well, doesn't expose the fact that it is not a legitimate, you know, fight going on. Right. And so like, how, how then would the, say, like the role of the, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a media person himself. How is he taking part in this, in this? For, yeah, for, for the, for the media narrative?
- [59:46]
John Bechtold
Yeah. Well, it's, it's, I mean, it's kind of surprising to me in a way because again, he is what, the Secretary of War or defense. And, and I'm sure that there is a group of people dedicated to decontextualizing information that's emerging in a public domain. I know the Secretary of Defense in the past has appointed specific individuals to surveil the information space looking for any unfavorable information. And I, I, I, I would think that, that the secretary would be more skilled in that space than what he's demonstrating right now. Now, not to say that he should be skilled. Right. I mean, you know. Yeah, I would think that, I think that he would recognize the value of how he could influence the information environment in ways that he doesn't seem to recognize.
- [60:51]
John Armenta
Right. Like using his media background to his advantage more directly. Yeah. Okay.
- [60:58]
John Bechtold
So especially now that he's privy to how the military operates.
- [61:02]
John Armenta
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I'm very thankful for the time that you've given us. Is there any final thoughts that you have? Or actually maybe a better way to say it, like, let's talk about your future projects. What are you working on? What are you working on? Now? You mentioned a photography project that's in the works. Please talk about that.
- [61:29]
John Bechtold
Yeah, sure. So I've just been interested in, well, kind of reprising the quintessential American road trip, if you will. But as I kind of was looking at a lot of the photographers who have made those trips, for instance, Robert Frank famously in the 1950s, and others as recently as Anastasia Samuelova, moving north and south along U.S. 1, I felt like I wanted to do something similar. But rather than kind of move in an east to west form and east to west direction and kind of reprise kind of this mythos of the American west, the manifest destiny, that I would maybe start south to north and kind of retrace a migratory route, ancient route that kind of predates the formation of the United States. And I thought, well, let me start at the border, the southern border, and go all the way through the northern border. And as it happens, there's a highway that runs exactly from Laredo, Texas, all the way to Nebraska, literally from a location, a site where we kind of surveil the border, to a location where we have the capacity to destroy perhaps all life on the world through a nuclear arsenal. So I found that kind of dissonance interesting, you know, and we're moving from literally from centuries to silos. And I just thought it'd be interesting to kind of make that road trip and to let it be generative and to really understand and try to see how violence is represented along the way.
- [63:17]
John Armenta
And when are you going to be publishing the work or foreshorten?
- [63:22]
John Bechtold
I haven't done the field work yet. I'm still. Yeah, I'm getting ready to do the field work, hopefully soon, in the next, maybe a couple months or so.
- [63:30]
John Armenta
Again, we've been with John Bechtold. The book is US Militarism and the Train of Memory. Negotiated Dead space out in 2025 by Rutledge. John, thank you for your time.
- [63:42]
John Bechtold
No, thank you, John. I appreciate it.
- [63:55]
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